In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press.

Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.

Schooling as an institution is decaying, and there are alternate institutions popping up in the decentralized Network State. Will future employers prefer students who went to woke Harvard, or an autodidact who was homeschooled, utilized an AI tutor (Synthesis), and then went on to the Thiel Fellowship. Time will tell I suppose.

The democratization of the gentleman's C[1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C